A good Integrated Development Environment (IDE) is necessary to write good code. At least, in the beginning, it is. Visual Studio is one such development environment. It’s the gold standard for such programs.
An IDE contains everything you need, and more, for writing code. It provides syntax highlighting and lets you know if you made any errors. IDE features built-in documentation built right into the editor, making it easy to look things up. It features tools to diagnose issues, aka bugs, as well as an assortment of tools to make writing code easier.
While you don’t need an IDE to write code, you’ll find that once you become used to them, you’ll never want to write code without one. In the previous article, you installed Unity. In this one, you’ll get your code editor installed.
Note: This tutorial is part of a collection that teaches Unity development from the ground up. You can read the entire series over here. This series is free and does not require any account creation. All assets are provided. If you find it useful, feel free to buy me a coffee.
Choosing your code editor
Visual Studio is the preferred IDE for Unity, but that was not always the case. In the old days, Unity shipped for Mac with an IDE called MonoDevelop. While it worked well enough (I’ve written games in it after all), it was not a pleasant editor. Code writing sessions often felt like wrestling matches.
At some point, Microsoft released a version of Visual Studio for the Mac called Visual Studio Code. While I was skeptical at first, this simple editor has become my “go-to” editor of choice for all development tasks on a Mac. It’s just that good.
Soon after, it didn’t take long for Microsoft to port Visual Studio to the Mac. Unfortunately, Visual Studio for Mac didn’t last long. It now is deprecated and no longer maintained. This means if you should use Visual Studio Community on Windows and Visual Studio Code on macOS.
Visual Studio versions
Like Unity, Visual Studio is not free software. In fact, back in the day, it could be an easy two thousand dollars to get a stripped-down version of the suite. These days, you can get Visual Studio for free, but ultimately, Microsoft wants you to be a paying customer.
Visual Studio Community is the free version. It’s meant for open-source development and education. Once you reach a revenue spike of over a million dollars and your company exceeds five people, you must use Visual Studio Professional. Like Unity, you pay once you start achieving some sort of revenue threshold.
Visual Studio Professional gives you the base editor but all the bells and whistles. You also gain access to a few services. Being the year 2023, this editor is now subscription based so you are looking to pay forty dollars per month.
Visual Studio Enterprise gives you everything you could possibly need to develop software. This is the highest tier so naturally, it sports the highest price. This costs a cool two hundred and fifty per month.
If you are curious about all the different versions and the features between them, you can read more on Visual Studio’s comparison page. This series of articles will be using Visual Studio Community.
Note: Since I wrote this article, Microsoft officially announced that Visual Studio Community for macOS will be retired in 2024. You should use Visual Studio Code instead. I will be producing an article on this soon.
Installing Visual Studio Code on macOS
To install Visual Studio Community on a Mac, head over to the following link: https://visualstudio.microsoft.com/downloads/
Skip over the editions, and scroll down the page until you see a listing for Visual Studio on a Mac. This may have changed by the time you are reading this.
Make sure to click the Download for macOS button. This will prompt you to download a file. Download and unpack the application. Drag it to your Application folder. Launch the app.
When the application finishes launching, you’ll be presented with Visual Studio code and probably some additional setup prompts. Instead, click the Extensions button.
This opens the extension window. Visual Studio Code has hundreds, if not thousands, of available extensions. Not surprisingly, Unity is part of this extension library.
Click the Install button. And that’s it! You have Visual Studio Code installed on macOS.
Installing Visual Studio on Windows
To install Visual Studio Community on a Mac, head over to the following link: https://visualstudio.microsoft.com/downloads
You’ll see a whole bunch of options. Click the download link for the Community edition.
Download the file and run the installer.
It will take the installer a little time to complete as it downloads all of the components. Once complete, do not press the Launch button. Press the Modify button, instead.
This new dialog allows you to customize your installation. You can install special workloads, language packs, and install individual components. The Workloads tab is selected by default.
Scroll down until you see a Gaming category. It should contain an item called, “Game Development with Unity”. It should come installed with Unity. If it is not checked, check the item and click the install button. Now you can launch the editor.
In the case, you launched the application instead of checking for the Unity tools, you’ll be presented with a project window. All your code projects will appear in this window. Since you haven’t written any code yet, the window is empty.
Press the Continue without code option. This opens a blank editor. Select the Tools menu option. From the dropdown, click the Get Tools and Features option.
This will open the installer and present the Workloads tab. From there, you can scroll down and find the Unity tools as described earlier in the article.
Installing Unity on Linux
Believe it or not, you can actually use Unity on Linux. The process requires some understanding of the terminal. Also, being that Visual Studio Community, you’ll need to either use Visual Studio Code or use a native Linux code editor. Of course, you could try to run the application under something like Wine but you may run into lots of issues. Personally, I would use something like Visual Studio Code or JetBrains Rider.
Unity does provide instructions on how to install Unity for distributions such as Debian (and Ubuntu) as well as Red Hat (and CentOS). If you are using a different distribution then you’ll probably need to do some additional configuring to get Unity to work. Chances are, someone has already produced a guide on it.
You can find instructions on how to install Unity Hub for Linux on Unity’s official site. Also, make sure to check out the Linux support forum in case you have any issues. Unity Technical Support seems pretty active on it.
Where to go from here
Congratulations! You now have Unity installed on your system. There is actually a little more configuring that needs to be done, but you won’t do it for a little while. The next step is to actually launch Unity itself.
When launching Unity, you’ll want to launch a program called Unity Hub. You’ll learn how to do this in the next tutorial.
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